Christmas at Remarkable Bay

by Victoria Purman

  Why did this small seaside town still have a hold on her? As a child on holidays it was sun and the beach and family holidays and melting ice-cream. But now? It was so firmly stuck back in time that it still had a well-patronised video shop. A gust of wind chilled her more deeply through her coat and Roma examined her keys again. They represented some kind of new beginning. Not better necessarily, not shinier.

  But new.

  That’s what she needed Remarkable Bay to be.

  There were more keys on this key ring than she’d ever had in her life: front screen, front door, back door, various window locks and a storage cupboard which, the agent had assured her, she would need to keep locked if she was going to have strangers in her home.

  It was a completely reasonable idea to put to someone who’d just bought a rundown old guesthouse at the beach. The agent had probably assumed that she might be after a sea change or a renovation challenge and would restore the old guesthouse to some kind of new life as a boutique hotel. He’d hinted at it but Roma had smiled politely and never answered him. The last thing she wanted was strangers in her home and, if she was honest, she didn’t want old friends or new friends or family there, either.

  You couldn’t hide if people came to stay, could you?

  Roma took a quick guess about which of her mysterious keys would open the front door and on the second attempt she heard the snick of the lock. The door opened reluctantly, catching against the tattered and worn floral hallway carpet runner. With a shove of her shoulder, she managed to open the door all the way. Light streamed into the hallway in front of her. There was a room to the immediate right, with an open double doorway, and she went in and dropped her heavy shoulder bag and her bunch of keys on the floor. The jangling noise echoed throughout the empty house. This might have been a living room once. Roma screwed up her nose. It was dim in the early afternoon light and motes of dust floated in the space, like tiny confetti from a ghostly welcoming parade.

  She checked her watch. She’d made good time ahead of the removalists’ truck and it should be arriving any minute. In a more perfect world, one in which she didn’t have to finish up at work and settle on the house on the same day, she might have had time to get there in advance, to clean and paint and rip up carpets. But her life hadn’t been perfect for a while.

  ‘This is it,’ she whispered to the dust and the air and the quiet. ‘Welcome home.’

  She went out the front door and walked the short cement footpath to the gate. Her car was parked on the street, packed with bulging suitcases, her computer safely boxed, and precious keepsakes she couldn’t bring herself to entrust to the journey to the beach in the moving van.

  She went to flip open the boot of her car but stopped, taking a moment to look back at her new home. The guesthouse would have been quite grand in the bloom of its youth. It sat on the most prominent point on Ocean Street, its two stories high and important, and its stonework once a symbol of expense and prestige. The wooden fretwork adorning the balcony above and the ground floor veranda was as decorative as lace on a collar, but its white paint was peeling and loose, revealing layers of ruby red and pale cream underneath. Once, the well-to-do families of South Australia had spent summers in it, but the house was no adolescent now; no classic in middle-age, or a grand dame. Like the town, it had slowly died as other towns in the region had thrived. Remarkable Bay had become the runt of the south coast. The town, and her house, seriously needed love, some fool to come along and spend money to bring them back to life. And for the life of her, Roma still hadn’t quite understood why the fool had to be her. She was clear about why she’d left the city: there was no gotcha moment there. But why this place? Here in Remarkable Bay?

  Cautious and sensible Roma Harris had never run from anything in her entire life. Until now.

  Roma hauled her suitcases on to the footpath and placed them in a neat row. She lugged the first case to the front door, past the black wrought-iron gate and over the cracked footpath. The front door, designed to be a grand entrance, was surrounded by stained glass panels at the top and sides, thankfully still intact and made up of intricate floral designs in pale pink and forest green. Set into the plasterwork above the doorframe was a word which looked half worn away by years of salt spray and biting winds.

  Bayview. And then underneath it the date, 1916.

  The words and numbers were faded like a mirage or a memory; as if they’d been waiting for a hundred years for someone to come along and read them. A century, Roma realised with a little smile to herself.

  Bayview. 1916.

  All those fancy visitors from days gone by probably wouldn’t recognise it now. Above her, the wooden frame supporting the upstairs balcony was strung with silvery spider webs, dust and age. Below her feet, the concrete of the front veranda was cracked like shattered glass and had sunk into potholes in other places. The fly wire in each of the double-sash windows at the front of the house, one on either side of the front door, was flapping loose in the breeze.

  Roma sighed and let herself smile just a little. She would have to make a thousand decisions about the house in the next few months. New or old. Replace or repair.

  Live or exist.

  For now, for today, for this week, this month, she’d chosen to live.

  Roma discovered, to her surprise, that all the downstairs windows opened easily and, before too long, she could smell the sea and feel its crisp chill inside the house. She’d unpacked her belongings from her car and they were crowded together in a pile down the hallway and at the bottom of the staircase. She looked up. Light streamed down on to the steps and illuminated the landing where the stairs turned. Each tread was worn into a slight curve. The honeyed handrail was warm to her touch, smooth and safe, and she slowly took the steps, looking around her at the doorways leading into the five rooms upstairs and the small, functional bathroom.

  It was slightly warmer up there but she could already feel the breeze from the open downstairs windows swirling up the staircase and spreading its reach into every corner of the second floor. The room which would be her bedroom was at the front of the house, and as she made her way there with slow and hesitant steps, she felt a shuddering in her chest as she reached the doorway.

  There was nothing more symbolic of her new life than this room. A room she’d never shared with anyone. She crossed the large, empty space, double the size of the one she’d left behind in the city. The ceilings were like every other in the house: pressed tin painted over with white. The walls were a mint green, scuffed and gouged in places where it seemed furniture had been ground against the plasterwork. As she unlatched and swung open the French doors that opened onto the front balcony, Roma held her breath. Even though she had paid for a detailed building inspection before agreeing to the purchase and it had revealed the balcony was sound, she was nervous going out there. The area ran almost the length of the front of the house: about six metres long and two metres from door to railing. It had the best views of Remarkable Bay. Roma pictured herself sitting in a cane chair with a book and a glass of wine in the summer months, getting lost in the distant waves and the sleepy small town feeling of the place. When the weather warmed and the sun shone, this would be the perfect place to sit and think. Or maybe to simply sit.

  The rumbling of a truck echoed in the quiet and peaceful street. It came to a slow halt behind her car and when the driver cut the engine and hopped out, she waved down at him.

  ‘G’day, love.’ The removalist tugged at his football beanie, pulling it close over his ears against the wind. ‘I guess this is the place?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘We’ll start unloading. You know where you want everything?’

  Roma nodded and felt scared and excited in equal measure. She was ready for her new life to begin right here in the musty rooms and empty spaces of Bayview.

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ she called back.

  After a late dinner—takeaway hot chips from the pub—Roma had dragged a cha
ir out to her balcony from her bedroom and slumped into it. She was exhausted. It had taken the removalists three hours to unload her furniture and all her boxes, the stairs having made things slightly more complex. Everything was now in the right rooms, if not the right positions. That would all come later. For now, for tonight, she had a mattress and a sleeping bag. And she had a red wine in her hand. In a proper wine glass. Priorities.

  She had a blanket around her shoulders and she tugged it tighter as she took another sip of her glass of Barossa shiraz. Across the road, the reserve was dark now, sucked up into the blackness of the night. The night was so much thicker here without streetlights, something that had scared her on holidays in Remarkable Bay as a child unless she had her older brother Leo by her side. And then she had a flash of memory. Roaming children. Bright pinpoints of torch light in the scrubby coastal bushes. The scratch of branches on her arm. Mosquito bites and midges. Someone being kissed. She remembered there was a path across the reserve that guided walkers along the narrow steps down the cliff to the water’s edge but she couldn’t make it out now in the dark. All she could hear was the roaring white noise of the ocean.

  This was the peace she craved; the peace she hoped would calm her thinking and every trembling, anxious thought that had filled her head for three years. For the nights when she couldn’t sleep, when her memories became her nightmares and her jaw ached from the violent, crushing grinding of her teeth.

  She willed those thoughts away with another sip of wine. There was so much here to distract her from those memories. She knew that in winter, the southern right whales arrived in the bay to give birth, to seek solace from the raging far Southern Ocean. Would she be able to see them from her balcony?

  She held her glass high, made a toast to no one.

  ‘Happy first day,’ she called and her voice echoed in the street below.

  And it was then the sadness hit her like a firestorm. Uncontrollable, it swamped her, rose up and stuck in her throat and then exploded out of her mouth in raging sobs and shudders. She gripped the cane chair while her body shook and her throat scratched hoarse with her sobs. There had been no way to prepare for what had happened; there wasn’t the chance for the long, drawn-out, slow goodbye of an illness. There had only been the short, sharp shock of instant death.

  She’d held it in for so long and now it came out of her in a tumult.

  She had alienated all her friends with the depths of her grief. And now she’d left everything. She’d quit her job for a life as a widow at thirty-five, alone in a town where she knew no one. Roma let the tears fall, waited until the racking sobs receded and tried to feel every inch of this grief so she might grow to know it, get over it, move on from it.

  She needed more good days, she knew that. She needed more happy days. That’s what Remarkable Bay was for. Because if there weren’t, Roma feared she would go under, silently and easily, like the southern right whales gliding and disappearing into the depths of the winter ocean.

  Chapter Two

  ‘Hey, Leo.’

  Roma was still in bed when she answered the call from her big brother, her body complaining from the shifting and hauling and unpacking she’d done the day before. It had been a physically exhausting day but an emotional one too. This wrenching oneself from one life and dropping into another took a toll. A few times during the afternoon’s unpacking, during which she’d directed the movers to put the sofa over there and the kitchen table here, the chest of drawers upstairs and the red velvet winged chair in what was going to be her bedroom (up the stairs, turn left and the one with the French doors), she found herself on the verge of more tears. She didn’t sob—she was too controlled for that—but little thin tears had leaked from her eyes and drizzled down her cheeks. As she’d wiped them away with the dusty sleeve of her long-sleeved T-shirt, she’d fought the shudders which rattled her chest, and the fear that snaked up her spine and goose bumped her skin.

  There was no going back. That’s what she’d have to tell Leo.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said, his familiar voice clear and full of energy despite the early hour.

  ‘Good morning to you, too.’ The early morning light had Roma blinking her eyes. She pushed aside her sleep-mussed hair, pressed the phone into her ear and waited for the lecture. She was used to it from Leo, especially since their parents had died, and especially in the past three years.

  ‘You still in bed?’ he asked incredulously.

  ‘Yes. I am.’

  She imagined the judgement in his silence. You’ve let yourself go, Roma. You’ve got to move on. It’s time.

  ‘I suppose it is Sunday,’ he finally conceded.

  She stretched an arm out above her, yawned on purpose. ‘And don’t tell me. It’s still almost the crack of dawn, despite the half hour time difference between you and me, and you’ve already been to the gym, run ten ks and had something biodynamic for breakfast, right?’

  ‘Two out of three ain’t bad. How’s everything with you? It’s hard to keep track of what you’re up to since you never post on your Facebook page.’

  She hadn’t seen Leo in six months, since her birthday back in February, when he’d surprised her with a flying visit to Adelaide and then convinced her to put on a cocktail dress that was too tight and high heels that pinched and dragged her to drinks at a new bar in the city filled with men sporting hipster beards and women who looked like pin-up girls from the forties. She’d had fun that night. It had been such a long time since she’d been out on the town, since she’d let herself laugh without feeling guilty. She’d enjoyed it despite the fact that Leo had invited Addy McNamara. She wasn’t sure why Leo had asked her to come along. They were related to Addy, distant cousins in fact, and Addy and Roma had been close as children and teenagers, but they’d drifted apart and hadn’t shared a meaningful conversation in years. Apparently Leo had reconnected with Addy when she’d worked on a film in Sydney a couple of years ago and had needed somewhere to stay for a couple of months.

  ‘I’ve sworn off Facebook,’ Roma replied. The truth was, she didn’t want to see how happy everyone else was, to be confronted with their good times and meals and holidays and humorous anecdotes because she had absolutely nothing to give in return. ‘I’m good. Tired but good.’ Roma stretched and yawned.

  ‘So you’ve moved in?’

  Despite the physical distance between the siblings, Leo still called every week. For much of the past three years, his calls were place markers for Roma. A call from Leo meant it must be Sunday night and that meant the weekend was over and she would have to go to work the next day which meant she had to put a load of washing on, make her lunch, iron a shirt. They helped her get through the worst of it.

  And now, this morning especially, tucked up on her mattress on the floor, with the warmth of a sleeping bag her only comfort, alone in her new house, at the very beginning of her new beginning? It was so good to hear his voice that tears welled. She let them fall.

  ‘Have I moved in? Well, my stuff’s here. I’m surrounded by boxes and the place smells weirdly like possum urine, but it’s all going great.’

  Leo’s deep laugh down the line lured her into a broad smile. ‘Possum piss? How does that differ from regular piss?’

  ‘It’s more possumy.’

  ‘Damn, you make it sound so attractive. I can’t wait to come and stay. Hold on. On second thoughts, maybe I’ll head to Noumea instead of Remarkable Bay for my summer holidays.’

  She gasped. ‘Too late. You promised. I believe we even did a pinkie swear over expensive champagne so you can’t back out now.’

  ‘Yes, well, I was drunk and I made that promise to you to come home for Christmas long before you came up with this harebrained scheme to run away to the beach. Remind me again why you did it?’

  Leo was right. Six months before, on her thirty-fifth birthday, the night they’d had drinks in that hipster bar, she’d had a life somewhere else. In reality, it had become half a life, maybe even less. She was st
ill getting up every day and going to work, doing all the boring administrivia that went along with being gainfully employed and having a house of one’s own, and making it through each day. The idea of throwing that all in and moving to Remarkable Bay hadn’t even been a glimmer of a notion inside an idea back then.

  ‘I follow one of those real estate websites on Facebook and this house popped up in my newsfeed.’ While that was true, she hadn’t simply opened an atlas—or Google maps—and randomly selected Remarkable Bay as the place for her exile from her life. She’d been searching the web for houses to rent there, thinking that maybe one day soon in the future, possibly next year, she might go back there for a holiday.

  And then one day, Bayview was on her screen, somehow calling to her.

  ‘It just popped up in your newsfeed, like magic? And that was a sign or something that you should buy that old wreck?’ Leo scoffed from fifteen hundred kilometres away. ‘C’mon, Romes. We used to cross the street to avoid that place. You’re not going to tell me you believe in fate and all that bullshit, are you? Especially after what happened to Tom.’

  Three years and she still flinched at the mention of his name. And there it was, the grief, multiplying like some disease in a Petri dish. Roma’s grief had grown big in her empty house in the city; in inverse proportion to the shrinking of her heart. It had taken time, months, years of sadness so overwhelming it was like trudging through quicksand, before she’d finally realised that quietness and a fresh start was what she needed; that a new life—or at least a new chapter—was within her reach. She needed to wipe the slate clean; to wake up in a room that wasn’t one she’d shared with Tom; to cook in a kitchen where she didn’t see him complaining about having to wipe the saucepans.

  Leo understood the silence. She braced for the inevitable lecture. ‘Listen, Roma. You shouldn’t have spent all your money on that place.’